[Fwd: SERMON: Living Under Fascism]

[Neil Schneider]

<http://www.uua.org/news/2004/voting/sermon_loehr.html>
SERMON: Living Under Fascism

Davidson Loehr
7 November 2004
First UU Church of Austin

[Excerpt]

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a
serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap
name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies.
But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to
persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid
is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary
implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s
what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to
raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to
add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.

The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of
sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and
the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was
that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual
sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman
Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber
of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism"
they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and
Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of
fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an
economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and
'30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of
Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted
in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by
quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and
Europe.

-- 
Neil Schneider                              pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net
                                           http://www.paccomp.com
Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B  8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
                 -- Dr. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735)